


talk about going on

by Justausernameonline



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Byleth is still chilling in the ether, Canon-Typical Violence, Depression, During Timeskip (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), F/F, Hurt/Comfort, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, War, i wrote this quickly because (bad day plays)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2020-12-17 10:35:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21052979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Justausernameonline/pseuds/Justausernameonline
Summary: Whether she crossed blades in the backstreets of Enbarr, whether she hurled bolts across Garreg Mach’s steep mountains or Leicester’s gloaming glades, Dorothea guarded her voice well. She was especially adamant of losing it in wartime. Her songs couldn’t move mountains, but they rallied spirits, fought the silent gloom. Tales of woe and bumbling triumphs filled what food couldn’t by the campfire to any who listened. With these little routines, the breaths between battle and preparations were a sliver more bearable. If there was one thing the years hadn’t lay waste to, it was practicing the arts. She had clung to it in the past. It was merely habit to reach for it once more against the longest nights and the days the ground seemed to drown in rust.// (Alternatively, Dorothea is all too willing to throw her life down for the cause. After a close call, Edelgard tries to amend that.)





	1. Chapter 1

Whether she crossed blades in the backstreets of Enbarr, whether she hurled bolts across Garreg Mach’s steep mountains or Leicester’s gloaming glades, Dorothea guarded her voice well. She was especially adamant of losing it in wartime. Her songs couldn’t move mountains, but they rallied spirits, fought the silent gloom. Tales of woe and bumbling triumphs filled what food couldn’t by the campfire to any who listened. With these little routines, the breaths between battle and preparations were a sliver more bearable. If there was one thing the years hadn’t lay waste to, it was practicing the arts. She had clung to it in the past. It was merely habit to reach for it once more against the longest nights and the days the ground seemed to drown in rust.

It was only time there was an exception to that rule, but she had no idea of the form it would take. 

Here: incendiaries, leveled at the emperor. 

Boxed in by bloody howling and alone, having dismissed her battalion after hits too many, Dorothea had worked a frenzy across the bright field, numbing herself to each life she ended efficiently. It wasn’t difficult to run a path down to the emperor, garbed in that red one could spot much farther than a stone’s throw away, dancing up a storm. She often wondered why she chose the garish color, no offense. _ Look at me_, it said. _ Beware_. 

_ Beware of the company I keep and gather. _

Dorothea just kept running to her. She wanted to wash the blood weighing the cape down, wipe the blood creasing the emperor’s brow and the corner of her lip. There wasn’t much left she could do but this. A little encore, one could call it. Usefulness.

Magic flooded to her fingertips, and she took aim. She saw the gambit then. 

Just her.

It wasn’t a particularly alarming sight, but in the time she made crossing the battlefield and slew a few foes barely older than her, the emperor was coated in more blood imaginable and had lost a great number of her battalion, a rare circumstance. Underestimating the enemy’s might was even rarer. They closed in as quietly as they could be. Following them were the incendiaries, primed, outfitted in fléchettes that glinted in the afternoon sun.

Dorothea’s mind floundered. 

“Edie,” she cried, a little noise as thoughts of dirges sprung fast as though from a font. Those were songs she didn’t intend to sing for _ her_. 

She raised her skirt and shot forward, swearing eloquently under her breath. Tethering the breezes that had swept the battlefield to her whim, she coaxed them to a roar, ignoring the strain it dealt to her because she was running. She could stop the blood. She thought this through to the moment the incendiaries exploded. 

It fell, this marvelous specter of pure sound, a whirlwind that stopped the fléchettes cold in the emperor’s path. It sent them careening like steel petals shaken from their stems, and the worst of it buried into Dorothea, but not before she turned away. The rest shredding into her back, she bit back a scream.

She crashed and turned and bled, but inside she was laughing herself ridiculous—what a diva she was—and then the emperor reached her, bloodier than ever, and she didn’t anymore. 

When she tried to give her usual words of reassurance, they came out as a croak, and she stilled, equal parts embittered with terror and embarrassment. Eventually, the pain won out, and she lied there, running tunes in her mind over and over.

“Dorothea,” the emperor said, her voice ragged as she knelt beside her, unceremoniously dropping her axe and shield to the ground. “All I ask is that you refrain from future brazen acts like this.” Those eyes as bright as wisteria blossoms glistened, but she shed no tears for her. It was hardly practical, with the battle so close by. Dorothea had never seen her so distraught anyway, and held no such expectations.

Then again, she was embedded with a concerning number of fléchettes, so it was a wonder she was still conscious. She couldn’t smile for her, couldn’t speak, nor could she embrace her, so just she raised her brows, pouring as much challenge into her expression as she could. 

Magic flooded into her fingers, and she took aim, flopping her hand onto the emperor’s splayed carelessly against the dirt, healing bruises and aches and cuts. 

_ “Dorothea!” _

Too late, the emperor withdrew her hand. She returned it just as quickly, as though she was appalled by her own action.

The look Edie gave her was too much. It burned deeper than the wounds on her body. But there was no better reward than the sight of her alive and well.

Now she could close her eyes. 

//


	2. Chapter 2

Dorothea woke to hunger gnawing at her gut. 

So she hadn’t succumbed to her wounds. If not for the ceiling of the infirmary room and the clean sheets drawn to her chin, colored by morning light, to greet her, she would have thought herself in another nightmare staged on Enbarr’s streets. Thankfully, she was sorely mistaken. This hunger was nowhere as strong as the ones she had in all those years ago, but she could always rely on them to impress upon her the precarity of her life. There was some strength in remembering. 

Forgetting demanded much more than she could give. She couldn’t banish them as simply as extinguishing candles when they pursued her throughout nights that left her most low, when they sent her roving from corner to corner of a poor score with the quick, jagged curl of her quill. But if there were memories that hurt worse than treading on open wounds, then there lived those that made her believe she walked on sunshine. Such was the undertow of the body tumbling its way to understanding, a sense of balance for a troubled mind. Now, she barely thought ahead. 

Once upon a time, she spent her days studying the ground, head bent in supplication as thousands passed her by. She appreciated the distance until she really had to beg, and to beg was its own punishment. A minute beating would call for hours of waiting, searching places to rinse the blood and grime from her skin, the image of her latest assailant branded behind her eyelids. There would come the glowers at her wailing when she was younger and fresh on the streets and tears were the first natural thing to do. Everyday, she braced their blows and took to the streets for a scrap to sustain herself. She had wondered, then, what exactly prompted them, every time, after the longest time, to relent, holding no small horror for the things she had endured. Oh, did she learn. 

Music took its time to thrive. She embraced it, as tightly as an orphan could without anything but her name and mother’s songs. The idea it would pave a path to better days once charmed her, and she had danced and danced around it like the dust scattered across the alleys when the sun hit just right. 

Hers had bloomed miraculously in wake of one who had followed snatches of her voice carrying from one listless day toward the next, and it could shrivel and rot just as spontaneously. By chance, she was brought to this world, and her first years of life fell in turmoil merely from her mother’s station, her failure to meet the expectations of a noble. 

And there remained children out there, living hand to mouth. Friends whose faces now blurred in the mind’s eye, shadows who had helped her share against the brunt of the depraved, the goddess-bothering, the relentless and the watchful—the ones who did nothing but _ watch _—many friends had fallen asleep in the wake of hunger. 

She dug her fingers into the bed. 

The friends who had managed to rise to take on the challenges of the following day, she knew them alive. But there remained a distance she had never meant to create, and it grew with each person she slew on the battlefield. 

Even unarmed she saw herself ending families without stepping into their homes. Too many people died to be buried in a neat grave with their name for loved ones to see, if they had any left at all. A spectrum of people more were to die by her blade or at her magical discretion. Always, there were people fighting for their beliefs in juxtapose to her own. She couldn’t quite blame them, fed by lies, hewn to their very breath from where they lay. 

Her eyes stung, and she shut them tight. She didn’t want to believe in these things, but any thoughts of war always turned her toward the grotesque. 

Nonetheless, before the war broke across Fódlan, people died in the streets since time immemorial. They wasted away in the countryside, in the household and in the mind and the heart and the ocean breeze and more she couldn’t quite name starving. 

With a sigh, she set her gaze on the ceiling and counted in fours in circles. It was the most she could do, feeling flattened by a carriage gone astray from the road and dragged across wild roses. 

A flicker of disappointment that she woke up at all struck bright and cold. Wracked with pain, bedbound, didn’t have many means to cast it off. Singing and humming were out of question. So she _ must _ be grateful, to the healers who had helped her, to those who sped her back behind the crumbling walls of Garreg Mach, and to the one who had kept her from further harm as she fell on that field. 

Gratitude was in order, but all she had were platitudes. They paled in light of her sacrifice, theirs, the cost of maintaining her life. Other ways of repayment were possible, that much was certain, and yet this morning, her mind continued to fail her. 

She wanted to blame it on the hunger encircling thought, or the new habits she had built in service to the dawn of a new world. One worth fighting for. What she wanted was a meaningful pursuit toward realizing the best ways to put the skills she accrued in the short time she frolicked the earth, so that now, she was always needed. 

Reliable. 

Useful. 

She was happy to ponder the answer. 

A real answer, to her, needed utmost patience worth starlight. Full-fledged conviction. 

Not one so rapid as _ she would kill again. _

Once she recovered, she would kill again. She remembered this keenly and not the dead, knew not how many died by her hand, and she wondered if it meant she was beyond caring. 

Of course not. To end a millennium of suffering by a few years’ time, war almost felt natural as falling. Drastic measures and drastic change. Everywhere, everyone. 

Her as well. 

She had to accept it. 

At once, something primal in her protested. It was a long-held denial, twisting her in several directions like a compass askew, and she could not cry out as tears blurred her sight. 

Any attempts at calm fell to an agony that shredded into her chest. Once eluding her, it coiled white-hot around her throat, rushing down until she was writhing in bed. She restrained her screams, her flailing, the sudden need melt the room in magic, anything to release her from self-imposed torment. Nothing and everything at once, she cursed herself for abandoning the numbness of sleep too soon above ragged breaths. 

It was a tired routine, one she would rather challenge in the evenings solo. She tore her gaze from the ceiling and begged around the room. Through it, she found her. 

Edie. 

Edie. 

Edie.

Edie. 

Edie.

Edie.

Just Edie. 

Dorothea stifled a sob. 

There she was. How long she had laid there, the answer didn’t matter, but Dorothea kept watching in bed, gathering her breath as she waited for Edie to wake, far too caught in this first instance of her slumbering to move. She only wished for her to continue, guilt aching in her chest.

She slept soundly, for one thing. Ever wary of the daily contingencies war brought, Dorothea’s gaze flit about the room before they fell on Edie once more, assured the sight was no ruse. A wrinkled shirt and pair of dark pants held up by suspenders had replaced her bloodied armor and cape, and her hair, tossed over her shoulder, had returned to its usual soft luster. With her arms pillowed around her head, sleeves hugging her biceps, they obscured all but her lips and one closed eye. It didn’t seem entirely uncomfortable, but Edie was hardly one to prioritize comfort over practicality. An emperor had places to be. She had places where she belonged.

What stood the test of time were her gloves, bone-white and bunched around her wrists. Dorothea swallowed and averted her gaze. However many times she had done so in recent past, though, she couldn’t suppress the warmth bubbling in her chest, spilling outward the longer she watched Edie in a future’s call toward peace.

Finally, as though held by a thousand demons’ hands, Dorothea braced herself on one elbow and surged to a sitting position. She bit back her pain, swaying as she worked gently to untangle Edie’s arms for her head to rest on the bed. Instead, her hand caught under the curve of Edie’s jaw, hard and soft and warm and too, too close. She tried to wriggle her fingers out from under with the littlest of motions.

Edie breathed in, sighing deeply, and sunk into her touch.

Dorothea stilled. She shook her head and shook at its pleasantness as her voice left in a raspy huff. Then her elbow buckled, and she collapsed, jostling the bed and—

“Dorothea?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally wanted this chapter to be longer or sumthing, but i've been hacking at this for weeks going nowhere, therefore YEET eep

**Author's Note:**

> (A/N): jsyk, im saving up for the game per usual, to provide context for why i sweat buckets every time i write for fe3h @@;; apologies for the ooc-ness  
i wanted to explore dots about Doro and El, trying stuff yeet ><)b
> 
> Edit (12/20/19): changed the summary from "It wasn't difficult to run a path down to the emperor [...] Dorothea just kept running to her." to first paragraph


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